In June 2022, Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) was chosen to host Jupiter, Europe's first supercomputer, which can process a quintillion (a million trillion) mathematical calculations per second.
It belongs to the category of exascale supercomputers. To explain the power of these supercomputers, let me use the same example set by Jack Dongarra, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, when he was describing Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer. He said if we assumed that one person performs one mathematical calculation in a second, an exascale supercomputer can, in one second, make the same number of calculations as done by all people on the planet in four years.
Jupiter is among the most remarkable supercomputers in the world; it is three times more powerful than Europe's most powerful supercomputer at the moment. Its performance is equal to 10 million advanced desktop computers. Operating Jupiter requires space equal to four tennis courts, and more than 260 kilometers of high-performance cables.
The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) signed a contract to buy Jupiter from a coalition of companies led by Eviden, a French company specializing in advanced computing, and Partec, a German company specializing in quantum computing. The cost of Jupiter is about 500 million euros; equally funded by the European Union, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Jupiter's primary mission is to assist scientists and researchers in the academic and industrial fields, to make breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), drug development, and climate research. This will be achieved by providing the technical infrastructure needed to enable researchers to perform dynamic molecular simulations for developing drugs and materials, training language models and artificial neural networks needed to achieve progress in generative artificial intelligence, and conducting high-fidelity computational simulations for climate studies. Jupiter can also be used in other applications in the fields of medicine, quantum computing, cosmology, and energy.
Jupiter will become operational during the last months of 2024, heralding a new era of major scientific achievements, contributing to economic growth, and providing solutions to pressing problems. The story of developing this supercomputer should be counted as a model to follow for international cooperation to achieve progress in industry and scientific research. We hope that more governments and international institutions find inspiration in these ambitious scientific projects, which, although requiring huge budgets, undoubtedly bring great benefits to humanity as a whole.
References
eviden.com
Innovationnewsnetwork.com
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